Food, Health and Berries

All of this is built and you can go and do it now, including the third gauge beside the two bars — the one for the weather. It works, and the weather really can kill you. The one part still missing is clothes: there is no wool in the world yet, so the four slots for them stay empty.

Two bars, and only one of them is about being hurt

At the bottom of the screen there are two bars.

They mean different things and they move for different reasons. Keeping them apart is the whole point — if there were only one bar, a fall, a creature and an empty stomach would all look identical, and you would have no idea which one was happening to you.

Time makes you hungry

The food bar goes down on its own, steadily, from the moment you start playing. From full to empty is about an hour.

It does not go down faster when you work. Building a wall for an hour and standing on a hilltop for an hour cost you exactly the same. This is deliberate: this is a game about building things, and a meter that punished you for building things would be the wrong game.

But bad weather does make it go down faster. Frost, wind and rain each take more food out of you, and the worst Icelandic day empties a full bar in about twenty minutes instead of an hour. That is the whole reason the third gauge is there. It is its own chapter: Cold, Wind and Rain.

Food is what buys your health back

This is the part worth understanding, because everything else follows from it.

When you are hurt and you have food, your health climbs and the food bar pays for it. One point of food for one point of health. When you are hurt and you have no food, it does not climb at all.

So the food in your pack is not a chore to be silenced. It is what you spend to survive a bad day. A full food bar means you can take a knock and recover; an empty one means you cannot.

When the food runs out, it kills you

Your health starts falling. It takes about four minutes to go from full to nothing, and the screen will say Sveltandi — nothing left to eat.

It does not stop, and you die. ⚠️ It used to stop just short, and it has not since the 3rd of September.

Running out of food is the only way to die. There is nothing in this world that will attack you, no fall will hurt you and no weapon exists. Cold, wind and rain kill by making you burn food faster, so every death in this game arrives through the food bar — which is why the whole way down, the screen tells you what is happening.

It is slow and it is loud. From a full bar to dead is about an hour outdoors in fair weather, and you are warned for the last four minutes of it.

What dying costs you

Everything you are carrying. Your hands and your pack are emptied, and there is no going back to the spot to fetch it.

✅ What you are wearing stays on. ✅ And anything you left in a chest, a storehouse or a hearth is untouched — it was never something you were carrying, so a death cannot reach it.

A chest holds twenty-seven things, a storehouse holds fifty-four, and a hearth holds wood and charcoal. Anything you leave in a container stays there.

And there is somewhere to wake up. Light a hearth and it becomes your home: if you die, that is where you open your eyes, with full health and a full stomach. The most recent hearth you lit is the one that counts — so a fire lit on a trip moves your home, which is worth knowing. Open any hearth and the line under the fire tells you which it is: Your home — you will wake here, or how to make it so. If you have never lit one, you wake where you first arrived.

⚠️ So the honest advice: keep what you would hate to lose in a chest, not on your back — and light a fire at home before you set off.

What the screen tells you

Under the bars, in words, so you never have to guess:

Berries — the first thing you can eat

Look for lyng. It is the low, dark heath that covers about a quarter of the ground, and you are almost certainly standing on some.

Point at it and right-click. You get one berry — a krækiber or a bláber depending on the patch — and the heath is not destroyed. You have picked it, not dug it up.

Then right-click while you are holding the berry to eat it. Each one puts ten percent back on the food bar, so ten berries takes you from empty to full.

Two things worth knowing

A patch you have picked needs about five minutes before it bears again. Do not stand there clicking it. Walk to the next one — the heath is everywhere, and walking across it picking as you go is what berry picking actually is.

A patch always gives the same berry. The slope behind your house is the crowberry slope, every time you come back to it.

Berries are a start, not a diet

You can live on them, and for the moment you will have to, because they are the only food in the game. They are not meant to be what you live on. Fish is meant to be that — it was in the real Iceland too — and berries were a thing you gathered in late summer to get you through, never a staple.

They also should not be there all year. In the real world they ripen from midsummer into autumn, and one day they will do that here. For now they can be picked in any month, because a berry you can only find in September is a berry nobody could test in August.

Söl — the food that needs no tool at all

Walk down to the shore and look at the rocks at the water's edge. Söl grows there — dulse, a flat red-brown weed that lies close against the stone.

Point at it with an empty hand and take it, the same way you pick up driftwood. No tool, no breaking, nothing to make first. It is the only food in the game you can reach the moment you arrive.

One söl is worth about the same as one berry — a tenth of your food bar.

Icelanders ate söl for a thousand years. It was traded, it was left to people in wills, and in 1552 it was part of what a schoolboy was fed. The old land register from 1703 says both farms on our own stretch of coast had enough of it for the household.

And two seaweeds you cannot eat

Þari is the olive-brown wrack lying in tangles on the wet rock, the one with the little swollen bladders. Beltisþari is a taller kelp that grows further out, on the seabed where the water is deeper — you have to go under to reach it.

Neither is food. Icelanders did not eat them. They fed them to sheep through the winter, spread them on the home field, and burned them dry when there was no wood. So for now they are material: you can pick them, carry them and store them in a chest, and there will be something to make from them later.

⚠️ Söl is food, so it goes in the býtibúr. Þari and beltisþari are not, so they go in a chest or a skemma.

There are fish in the sea, and you can catch them

Walk down to the shore and look into the water. Four kinds of fish swim there, and you can tell them apart by size and colour:

Ufsi and þorskur are the common two. A lax is a rarer thing to meet — it is a salmon, and one in the sea is on its way to a river to spawn. It is also worth the most to eat, so the biggest fish in the water is the one worth catching.

A bleikja is an arctic char, and a char is a river fish — so one in the sea is a visitor. Real Icelandic sea-going char come down to the sea for about seven weeks in the middle of summer and then go back up the river. Ours has not learned to leave yet, so for now you will meet one all year round.

All four fish are solid now

They used to be photographs standing up in the water, the way a cardboard cut-out stands up — flat, and nearly invisible edge-on.

Now each one has an actual shape. It is round, the light falls across its side, and it still looks like a fish when you look straight down at it from a rock. The tail is a thin fan, because a real tail is thin.

🎯 The bleikja was built that way first, on its own, so it could be judged against the flat three — and it won.

You can see them because the sea is see-through now. If it looks too clear or too solid to you, press Escape, open Graphics, and drag Water clarity until it looks right.

Catching one — the spjót

Make a spjót at the workbench. It costs one stone and one stick, which makes it the cheapest thing in the game — you can have one within minutes of starting.

Then wade out to a fish, point at it, and left-click. You have to be close: about three and a half metres, which is nearer than you can reach a block. You cannot stand on the bank and take one.

A bigger fish is easier to hit. A lax is over a metre long and a bleikja is half that, so the salmon — the one worth most — is also the one you are most likely to hit.

Hold still and they settle. A fish drifts away when you rush at it, and comes back when you stop. The skill is patience rather than speed.

The spear wears out after about a hundred and fifty fish, and then it is gone, the same as an axe.

What a fish is worth

⚠️ Raw food stops at half the bar, however much of it you eat. You can fill your pack with cod and still not get past halfway. Cooking is what breaks that ceiling — cooked food carries you all the way to full.

Fish live in the býtibúr, like all food, and not in a chest.

Meat — a sheep, and a knife

Make a knife (hnífur) at the workbench: two stones over a stick. Hold it, look at a sheep close by and left-click.

• A struck sheep flashes red, and bolts. It runs faster than it walks, but slower than you do — chase it and strike again.
• The third strike brings it down. It falls onto its side, and the meat and its skin, a gæra, go straight into your pack.
• 🦴 It also gives a bone (bein) — three in the autumn. Bones carve into fish hooks.
• ✂️ A sheep you have just shorn gives a bare hide, a skinn, instead of a gæra — its wool is already in your pack. Shearing is in The Controls.
• A sheep left alone for a minute is whole again, so you cannot wound one today and finish it tomorrow.

🍂 Wait for the autumn if you can. From 1 October to 1 December a sheep gives three pieces of meat and three skins instead of one of each. That is réttir, when the sheep come down from the summer grazing in the hills, fat. The rest of the year you get a third of that.

🔒 Only wild sheep, and sheep you have carried yourself. A sheep somebody else has brought home is theirs, and the game will tell you so.

🐑 Unless you carry it off. A sheep you pick up is yours — whoever it belonged to. The sheep thief, the sauðaþjófur, is an old figure in Icelandic history. Mind your pen — and shut the gate. A lamb you killed gives one piece of meat and no hide.

⚠️ Nothing uses the gæra or the skinn yet. Keep them.

Fishing with a rod

A rod (veiðistöng) lets you fish from the shore, where the spear needs you to wade in. Make it at the workbench from three sticks, a fishing line (færi) and a bone hook (öngull) — see Making Things.

• Hold the rod and press the right button to cast. The float lands where you are looking, up to ten metres away, and it must land on water.
• Watch the water. After a few seconds a fish nearby notices the float, and you can see it swim to it.
• 🫧 When the float goes under, press the right button again — quickly. You have about a second and a half. Land it and that fish goes into your pack.
• ❌ Too slow and it gets away — it bolts, and you lose nothing but time. Another may come.
• 🌊 No fish near the float? After half a minute the game tells you. Try somewhere else — fish gather in the sea along the shore.
• 💨 Wind makes the fish slow to come, and in a gale nothing bites at all. The weather is the real weather, so some days are simply not fishing days.
• Press the right button with no bite to wind the float back in.

The rod lasts for 150 fish. Missing costs it nothing.

Most Icelandic sea fishing was done with a handfæri — a hand line with a hook and a stone weight, no rod at all. The rod is the river-bank way.

Cooking

You cook at a fire. Walk up to a lit hearth and press O, or right-click it with an empty hand.

The screen has three parts, left to right:

Put fish in the left, wood underneath, and wait. You can load the fish first and light the fire afterwards; it makes no difference.

One birch log cooks sixteen fish, about nineteen seconds each. The wood still turns into charcoal while it burns, and the charcoal comes out into the same four boxes as the food — so those four boxes hold both.

⚠️ If all four boxes on the right are full, the fish stays raw and waits. Nothing you put into a fire is ever destroyed. Charcoal is the one thing that can be lost when there is no room, because the fire keeps burning rather than stopping.

The screen keeps itself up to date while you stand there, so you can watch the fish come out.

You can also cook in a býtibúr

A búr has a fire in it. Open one and you will see two tabs at the top — Food and Fire. Food is the 54 slots you already know; Fire is exactly the screen above, and it works exactly the same way.

🔴 With two differences.

• It lights itself. Put in wood and something to cook, and it catches on its own. When the food is done it finishes the log it is on and goes out, so a búr only burns wood while it is cooking. A hearth you light yourself, and it burns until the wood is gone.
• It makes no charcoal. Only food comes out of it. That is because only food keeps in a búr — so the búr is where you cook, and the hearth is where you make charcoal.

You do not have to go and fetch the fish. Under the fire there is a shelf — In the búr — drag up to cook — showing everything in the store that this fire can cook. Drag straight up from it into the cooking boxes. It shows only what can actually be cooked, so berries and söl are not on it.

And it works downwards too. Drag a cooked fish onto that shelf and it is put away in the búr, without going through your pack at all.

⚠️ And a búr's fire does not keep you warm. A hearth burning in a room turns the cold off entirely; this one only cooks. If you are cold, light a hearth.

They swim in shoals

Fish keep together now. One fish in a group leads and the rest follow it, keeping their own place a little behind and to one side — so a shoal travels as a shoal rather than as a crowd of fish that happen to be near each other.

A shoal scatters when you wade at it, and gathers again when you stand still. That is worth knowing, because it is the same patience that will catch one.

⚠️ Not every fish joins. About one in ten never does, and swims alone all its life. Ufsi and bleikja keep the tightest groups; a lax is a traveller and keeps almost none.

They notice you, and that is the whole of catching them later

Walk at a fish and it drifts away from you. Stand still and it comes back. That is deliberate: when the spear arrives, the skill will be patience rather than speed, which is what spearfishing actually is.

A lax notices you first and runs furthest. A bleikja lets you closest of all, then an ufsi — both of them shoal, and a fish in a crowd is a braver fish. And about one fish in ten of any kind is bolder than the rest, so there is usually something within reach if you wait.

⚠️ They keep to the top few metres of water and away from the very edge, where there is no room for a fish between the surface and the gravel. So wade out a little, or look down from a rock.

Under the water

Wade in deep enough to go under and the world turns green. You can see about thirty metres, the sea gets slowly darker the further down you go, and the sky is gone — there is water above you instead.

The fish do not go dark with it. They carry their own light, so a fish deep down is still a fish.

⚠️ You cannot swim and you cannot drown. You walk along the bottom exactly as you walk on land, and you can stay under as long as you like. ⚠️ And looking straight up shows you nothing — the surface of the sea is not drawn from underneath yet.